Wilfred Owen

Nov01

Wilfred Owen died 100 years ago this Sunday, November 4th. Sally Minogue links his poetry with that of a later conflict, the Vietnam War.

This is a time of Wilfred Owen commemoration. Last
weekend I attended a conference dedicated to Owen and his legacy, and this
coming weekend I’ll be in France to mark the hundredth anniversary of Owen’s
death on November 4th, 1918, one week before the cessation of
hostilities. And all over the country, in the Midlands where Owen lived his
younger life, in Craiglockhart where he had his seminal encounter with
Siegfried Sassoon, in Ripon where he spent his last creative period, he and his
poetry will be remembered. There is a savage irony in this huge remembering of
Owen. As a young poet he wanted nothing so much as to be known as a poet among
poets, a reincarnation of his beloved Keats. And so he was, and so he was
remembered – but, like Keats, knew nothing about it.

Owen prefigured this not-knowing to some extent in his
sonnet ‘To My Friend (with an identity disc)’, which I’ve written about before on this site. In that poem he reflects on himself as dead (so this is a
self-elegy), and reflects too on how then he might be remembered. And he
rejects the obvious forms of remembering, the signs of fame – the proclamation
of the ‘dead name’ inscribed ‘High in the heart of London’, the more hidden
glory of the much-visited but ‘quiet place’ like that of Keats’s cypress-shaded
grave. Instead he imagines his name persisting through the simple token of his
identity disc, worn against the heart of his friend.

But when Owen wrote this poem, did he really imagine himself dead? Hard for
any of us to do that, though arguably easier for those faced with imminent
death in battle, particularly with the high odds of dying that a junior officer
such as Owen faced. But when any of us imagine our dying, the paradox is that
we’re still in the picture – there to see its effects. There’s still that
romanticism in ‘Identity Disc’ in that Owen sees himself dead, but alive to see
himself dead.

There was a thread in the conference I attended that
linked Owen to the post-Vietnam poets – poets like no other in the American
tradition, yet drawing on an American form of poetic speech and breath and that
large poetic imagination for which we can’t find an equivalent in Britain or
even in Europe. It goes back to Walt
Whitman, as indeed, tangentially, do the First World War poets, who saw in
Whitman’s ‘Drum Taps’ (about the American Civil War) a model for their own
response to war.

One of the Vietnam generation of poets, W. D. Ehrhart,
said that he went off to fight thinking that he could be the Wilfred Owen of
the Vietnam War – but that he had neglected to realise that the Wilfred Owen of
the First World War had in fact ended up dead. Ehrhart survived, as did others
– John Balaban (a conscientious objector who went to Vietnam as a member of the
Peace Corps), Yusef Komunyakaa – and they wrote a searing poetry out of a
conflict that was, if possible, even more brutal than the First World War.
Dreadful damage was inflicted on the Vietnamese population; but dreadful damage
was also done to the American soldiers who inflicted it.

There’s a direct line between these two conflicts, and
a direct line between the poets who have written of them. In each case, the
lack of fore-knowledge is implicit, as in Ehrhart and Owen, both seeing
themselves as remembered poets – but neglecting to realise that their own
deaths were entailed in that. Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’ captures this
tragic not-knowing which also carries in it a sort of knowing which can’t be
acknowledged.

So
secretly, like wrongs hushed up, they went

Although the first line of the poem pictures the
soldiers singing – ‘Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way’ – that
‘darkening lanes’ immediately imposes a sense of foreboding. Similarly

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray

As men’s are, dead.

The supposedly celebratory sprigs of
flowers become funereal even before the men have left (proleptic echoes here of
Seamus Heaney’s ‘bloom of hawthorn’ in ‘In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge’).

I might dismiss this poem of Owen’s as too
doom-laden, foreseeing dread even in what was in reality often a triumphal
send-off, in the First World War anyway. But when I was a graduate student in
America in 1971, I was on my way home to England, passing through JFK airport,
when I saw a bizarre procession – young men followed by a small band of
friends, one of them piping on what I remember as a sort of tin whistle, part
celebration, part threnody. This was a funeral march before the funeral had
happened; and the young men were Vietnam conscripts going off to war. I have
never forgotten the image and all that was contained in it. Owen’s poem catches
some of that. And when he writes

Shall they return to beatings of great bells

In wild train-loads?

I think first not of First World War
returnees but of Vietnam veterans who came back for the most part to silence
and often to despair.

A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,

May creep back, silent, to village wells

Up half-known roads.

But then: those few imagined soldiers did at least come
back. Owen et al didn’t. I guess they’d rather have returned, even with the attendant
griefs. John Balaban has a poem ‘If Only’ in which he imagines the happy life
of survival. Its last line is

This is how it should have been.

There was a pervasive
feeling as we celebrated Owen at the conference, that he should have known how
he was remembered. He should have known that
he was remembered. He should have known that the remembrances he imagined
and then rejected – engraved name high up in London (now in Poet’s Corner in
Westminster Abbey), shaded grave visited by many pilgrims (as at his burial
place in Ors, France) – came to pass. His poetry remains and sustains - but it
would have done anyway. What we mourn is the irreplaceable life. This is
how it should have been.